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It’s 6 AM And All’s Well

October 20, 2014 - 06:16 — cmlisse

It's now 6 AM EDT on the 20th of October 2014, 18 hrs after the close flyby of Comet Siding Spring, and by all accounts the Mars spacecraft are all fine, as is the Comet. Now we get to wait and listen over the next few days to see what kind of imagery and spectroscopy of the flyby event we have obtained. (For example, some folks have accessed raw Opportunity images that they think may show a comet in the Martian sky, but we'll have to wait a few for pipeline data reduction, calibration, and validation to make sure what's there is real.) In the meantime the Pro-Ams will continue to monitor the sky around Mars, producing time lapsed sequences of the comet as it recedes from the Red Planet. Next up for A1 is its perihelion passage, which will occur ~4 days from now. Exciting times!